Bird House
by Cryptic Nymph
Summary: He told himself it was birds. Birds, that had moved into their little garden, and made their nests. Oneshot.


**I'm supposed to be doing my Maths homework, but I can't, so here's a story. Something to do, because I feel down. Enjoy.**

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><p>John tried his hardest never to notice the muffled sobs he heard from his sister's room. The first time, he'd always think he'd imagined it. The second time, he'd thought it was the cat. After it had continued through the night, he'd tell himself that it was something outside the window- and he'd have <em>nightmares<em> about it, the thing outside the window, knocking on the glass. He was only eight, remember. He was terrified that the thing outside the window would get in, and it would try to hurt him.

When he got a little older, he knew he couldn't keep believing in the nightmares, which would be childish. And there was one thing you didn't do at his secondary school, and that was being childish. Not immature, there was plenty of immaturity around the place. But he knew that he couldn't act like such a baby any more. So he told himself it was birds. Birds, that had moved into their little garden, and made their nests. He told himself this so many times that he began to believe that the birds were real, and he started leaving food for them. In the summer of his fifth year at secondary school, he made a bird house for them to live in. He'd painted it blue, a light blue, like the sky. And his father had been so _proud_, because he'd made it on his own, with no-one's help. But his praise just made him feel like a boy, and not a man.

The worst part was the silence, between the knocks, because even though he knew it was just a matter of time before the knocks started again, he began to hope that it would be the last one. It never was. And he told himself, he told himself that it was birds, the beautiful birds that lived in his bird house, they were trying to see him. Just after John went to college, his parents separated, and for the life of him, John couldn't make himself care. He knew he should, and that he must, but he couldn't make himself cry. And John took the bird house from his old house, before it was sold to that new couple with their dog and their organic cooking and their screaming, wailing child. He climbed up the tree where it hung, and he took off the lid, and there was nothing in there. No birds had ever even nested in there.

So later, when he was choosing a career, he chose the army. Because you can't _cry_ in the army, it's not allowed. It's practically a law. After Afghanistan, John began to have nightmares about the knocking on the window again, except this time it was louder, and more frequent, and he could barely drown out the noise. Oh, the noise it made, it made his throat scratch and his shoulders ache, and he could never remember why.

He and Sherlock were on a case when he got the call- a quick, choked phone call from his mother, the emotion thick in her throat, the words "Harry's dead," coming out in barely more of a whisper. And still, he couldn't force out the tears that he needed in order to be acceptable, he stood there with blank eyes and a slack jaw, shocked, but not feeling any grief. The funeral had been a sombre, unfeeling affair- after all; a forty one year old woman dying of liver cancer was unusual. Harry had drunk herself into an early grave. He'd tossed earth onto her coffin, with Sherlock stood next to him for moral support, and he thought to himself, _there was nothing you could have done_. But he knew there was.

When he'd got home to Baker Street, he'd loosened his tie, and sat in his room for a while. And he listened for the knocking on the window, but it had never come back. All his guilt, and all his fear, they'd just vanished. He kneeled down at the foot of his bed, and pulled out a little cardboard box from underneath it. Blowing the dust off the top, he removed the old newspaper covering it and picked up his little wooden bird house. And then he'd smashed it, because he knew then that by giving the birds a home, he'd made them welcome. By letting them in, he could never let them go.

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><p><strong>I hope what I was trying to say came across, thanks for reading.<strong>


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